A Little Bit of Spectacular (8 page)

“Yes,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

That was it exactly. The darkness made me feel like something was about to happen.

• • •

Still, I got no response from my message. Two weeks went by. I was beginning to feel desperate. Had the Plantagenets seen my response? Had they seen it and decided they didn't want to get to know me after all?

There was no way to know. Every morning I walked out the door, dragged myself to school, picked up my books, handed in my assignments, and did all the other hundreds of things I had to do to get me through the day, thinking of nothing but getting to Trattoria to check for any new writing on the wall. And every day I stepped into the bathroom and felt the disappointment hit me in the rib cage.

One morning, after the bell rang for changing classes, I heard my name as I was headed out the door. It was Rachel, holding out a small white rectangle.

“I don't know if you've got plans,” she said, “but I'm having a birthday party in a couple of weeks. The invitation's got my address and everything. It's no big deal—just a few people and some cake and stuff.”

I took the envelope from her hand. It seemed like it should have felt heavier, seeing as how it held everything I'd hoped for in those first days of sitting lonely and quiet at my desk. Now it wasn't quite the invitation I'd been hoping for.

“Thanks,” I said. “That sounds great.”

“Sure,” said Rachel, swinging her bag over her shoulder. “Hope you can come.”

I opened the envelope as I walked to social studies, in the middle of lockers clanging, tennis shoes squeaking, high-pitched giggling from clumps of girls, people bumping against me as we all rounded corners and pushed through doorways. I unfolded the invitation, which was made of thick black paper and designed like a chalkboard, with the details of Rachel's party done in pastel colors like chalk. In pinks and purples and greens, chalky handwriting told me where to go and who to call.

I fingered the paper, which felt rough between my fingers, not smooth like a real chalkboard at all. All the background noise faded away. I looked at the palm of my hand, half expecting to see streak of colors. The chalk hadn't rubbed off, of course. At least, it hadn't rubbed off on my hands. But the invitation was all over my thoughts.

The next morning, exactly seventeen days after I'd written my message on the bathroom wall, I woke up early. A little before five a.m., actually. Early enough that it felt like every time I blinked, my eyes might just stay closed. But I dressed quickly—a little afraid I might put my shirt on inside out since I didn't want to turn on a lamp—and got my stuff together, including a little plastic bag I'd bought at the art store. I left a note for Gram, who would be up around six a.m., saying that I couldn't sleep and had left for school early. I made it into the hallway without the door even squeaking behind me.

From there it was easy. I'd thought it all through while I tossed and turned in bed the night before. The streets were mostly empty—a few workers from Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's hustling down the sidewalk, a bus or two, the occasional car going by. But mostly I had the sidewalk to myself as night turned into day, grayer and cooler than the spring days had been lately. I could hear my own feet on the concrete, pounding a soft, fast rhythm as I walked. I wanted to get where I was going before the streets got any more crowded.

Across from Trattoria, there was an old brick storefront. There was a sign on the double glass doors saying the one-story building was going to be converted to a wine shop next year but there wasn't any sign of construction. The windows were covered in cardboard, and the doors were padlocked. There were cigarette butts along the window ledges, and spiderwebs hung from the edge of the roof.

Not a particularly impressive building. But at some point, someone had decided not to let it slide totally downhill. The white bricks were as gleaming as they must have been on the day the store opened. Sometime recently, they'd been cleaned or maybe repainted. But they made a giant white wall. Good as a chalkboard or a clean bathroom stall.

I opened my small bag and pulled out the box of chalk I'd bought. They weren't tiny little white pencils of chalk—these were huge round cylinders, the size of dynamite. I had a handful of colors that left a powdery rainbow on my palm. I looked both ways down the street—no one coming—and pulled out a blue the color of the sky.

I worked fast. When I was done, the letters were bigger around than my head. They took up the entire wall.

PLANTAGENET
I STILL WANT TO MEET YOU ANYWHERE
I'LL GO TO THE STARS
IF YOU NAME THE CONSTELLATION PLEASE RSVP WITH A DESTINATION.

Around the words, I'd drawn a rectangle with little curlicues at the edges. It looked a little like a party invitation.

Definitely not boring, I thought.

MY HEART'S DESIRE

I waited and waited some more. Plantagenets, whoever they were, didn't rush.

Mom was starting to move around more, and it made me nervous. She climbed up and down the stairs without me, saying she needed to get her strength back. She went for walks around the block and started cooking dinner for me and Gram. She was standing and smiling and joking around, and I kept expecting her to fall to the floor and collapse.
Poof
. She would be lying there on the floor, and all the smiling and cooking would have been like a dream. The tumors would be back.

So I was tense, waiting to wake up. Waiting for real life to start again. It's a terrible thing when you're in the middle of a beautiful dream, where you can fly and soar through the clouds and you're fast and light and it's all amazing, and then you wake up. And you can't fly after all. The disappointment makes you not even want to get out of bed.

Don't worry,
Mom said.
Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry
. She and Gram said it over and over, like when someone gets a song stuck in their head and just keeps singing the same line until you think your head will explode.

One night, the power had been out for a couple of hours. The power company kept saying they didn't know what was causing the problems and that the issue would be fixed soon. But night after night, everything went black. We were starting to get used to it. Mom and I sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to roast marshmallows over a fat red candle. It was going pretty slowly.

“Let's go swimming next week,” she said.

“Next week? That soon? It's still a little chilly.”

“It won't be chilly at the indoor pool,” she said, popping her barely tan marshmallow into her mouth. “Come on, I'm dying to get back in the water.”

It wasn't the best choice of words.

“I don't know,” I said.

“I thought you'd be glad that I'm back to normal,” she said, running her hand through her hair, which was shiny and bouncy in the candlelight. Her face wasn't washed out and grayish anymore—her eyes were bright and her skin was smooth. She did look normal. She looked better than normal. She looked beautiful.

That was part of the problem. It would be so easy to believe she was okay. It would be easy to fall into the dream. And if I stopped waiting and watching, I wouldn't be prepared. I couldn't let my guard down.

“Come with me,” she said. “Swim with me. I'll get some of those rings we used to throw to the bottom of the pool. You love diving down to the bottom.”

I didn't think I could do it. It almost hurt to think about being in the water with her. Why was that? Why did the thought of something so good and normal hurt worse than thinking of her in a hospital bed again?

“Maybe,” I told her, but I stood up and walked to the window. I needed a little space to think.

As I looked out over the city, I frowned. Lately, I'd seen one of two things out of my window: the usual city lights flashing at me from all over town, or the complete darkness of a blackout. Now I saw neither. Most of the city was black, all right. But off in the distance, I could see a silvery glow. It spread over the treetops and lightened the sky. I would have thought it was the airport, maybe, except it was coming from the wrong direction. And this light was too white, too bright to be runway lights. The glow was fuzzy and pretty, more like the lights from a circus or a fair. And it was the only light in the middle of the darkness, like someone had plugged in a night-light for the city.

“Mom, come look at this,” I said.

She stood and came to the window, her hand resting on my shoulder. Part of me expected the glow to vanish as soon as I tried to show it to her. That's what would happen in a movie. But it didn't vanish.

“What in the world?” said my mom, pressing her cheek against the window to get as close as possible. “There's nothing but houses over there. I think that's over in Forest Park.”

After a few minutes, the glow faded and then died out. The city darkened to black, with not even a glimmer of moon or stars in the cloudy sky.

“I wonder if anybody else saw that,” mused Mom as she headed back to the candle and our bag of marshmallows.

We had our answer the next morning. For the first time in days or maybe weeks, the newspaper headlines didn't focus on the blackouts. Instead the front page read, “Unknown Lights Spark Curiosity of Downtown Residents.” Rachel and her friends were all chattering about the lights as soon as I sat down—my guess was that even people who didn't see the lights were talking about them like they had. There were all sorts of theories—an explosion, a house fire, top-secret government experiments, and, of course, UFOs.

It was a relief to get to Amelia's house that afternoon. There'd been so much talk about the mysterious lights all day that I hadn't been able to sort through my own thoughts. Amelia's yard was a good place for thinking. We were surrounded by green—drooping leaves and winding vines everywhere, a jungle of trees and shrubbery and out-of-control flowers. It felt like a world away from Gram's condo and our school, like instead of taking a car, I should have had to row a boat downriver, past alligators and snakes, over waterfalls, and through caves. But I didn't. I just had to wait with Amelia for her mother to pick us up from school. It wasn't as adventurous as my imaginary boat trip, but it was a lot less sweaty.

We sat in the grass watching two frogs enjoy their exercise time. They had plenty of room to hop in their boxes, but Amelia thought it was good for them to broaden their horizons and have new experiences, so she liked to let them play in the yard.

I was watching Bertha, who was apparently not a frog at all but something called a Fowler's toad, bump against my right foot. Bertha seemed to think my foot was some insurmountable obstacle, like the Great Wall of China or the Grand Canyon.

“I wish you'd seen it,” I said to Amelia, who'd only heard about the lights when she got to school. “The whole sky was glowing.”

“Me too,” she said. “As soon as I heard, I knew you'd think it was them.”

In our conversations, “them” almost always meant the Plantagenets. The rest of the time, “them” usually meant frogs.

“What else could it be?” I asked. “We suddenly start having blackouts and strange lights . . . it has to be related to the messages.”

“So . . . ,” Amelia said, trying to act casual, “that means you do think we're talking about aliens?”

When she said it out loud, it sounded so silly. Geez, even when I said it in my head it sounded silly. The truth was, I wasn't sure it was aliens. Even in my most excited, optimistic moments, it was hard to convince myself we had a blue-eyed race of aliens running around the city messing with the power lines. But I was more and more convinced that whoever—whatever—the Plantagenets were, they had powers. Talents. Secrets. Every day that passed made me want to meet them more.

It was hard to put into words, and I decided to just change the subject.

“Where did you get these boxes anyway?” I asked Amelia.

“My dad built them, or, at least, he sawed the pieces,” she said, prodding a frog named Alexander until it took a giant leap. “I helped him hammer and nail them together.”

I watched Bertha try to navigate my leg. “I've never even seen your dad,” I said. “I didn't know he lived with you.”

“Course he does. He works nights—his shift is from four till midnight. He's never here when I get home from school. I haven't seen your dad, either. Where is he?”

Even if she hadn't just explained about her dad, I would have known by the way she asked the question that in her world, fathers were safe subjects. That she assumed fathers were kind and good and interested. And alive. It's not like she was the first person to ask the question. I'd figured out I could tell a lot about a person just by the tone of their voice when they asked. Sometimes, like with Amelia, there was no thought, no concern, like they were asking “What's your favorite color?” Those people usually had a really happy life with their dads, and they assumed you did, too.

Sometimes there was a little hesitation when people asked the question, a little pause between the words, a little fear that this might be an awkward subject. A lot of times those people had parents who were divorced, so they thought my dad just lived somewhere different than my mom. In my experience, people whose fathers had died never asked the question period.

I watched Amelia run one fingertip along Alexander's spine, assuming frogs had spines. I ran through my normal answers:
I haven't seen him for a while. I never really knew him. He doesn't live with us.
Usually any of those were enough to stop the questions.

I didn't speak, though. I didn't use any of my automatic answers. I just sat there.

“Olivia?” said Amelia, her hand paused a few inches above the frog.

Here's another thing that's good about bathroom walls: Sometimes you have stuff in your head that wants out. It's too big to be held inside, but you're nervous about what might happen if you let it out in front of people. No telling how it might look or sound once it's outside of your head. It's like the time I had a piece of vanilla birthday cake left over, and I stuck it in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator. When I opened it a while later, it didn't look anything like birthday cake. It was green and purple and bubbly, and the smell made me want to throw up. So what if a thought is like that? What if it grosses people out once you take the lid off?

You don't have to worry about that with a bathroom wall. You let out the thoughts in your head—who you love, what you want, just the fact that you exist—and there's no one around to watch you let them out. If anyone reacts to you, you're long gone before they do. You won't have to see sympathy or pity or awkwardness on anyone's face. You don't have to have a conversation. You just let it out, leave it there on the wall, and walk away.

It had been a long time since I stuck the thoughts of my dad on the back shelf of my head. The lid was on very tight, but, lately, I'd been thinking I wanted to take it off the shelf. It was heavy, and it took up a lot of room in there.

“Olivia!” said Amelia. She'd turned away from the frogs totally, and she looked like she was about to call 9-1-1. “What's going on? You okay?”

I was fine. I just couldn't talk. So I imagined the air in front of me as a large white wall, totally blank. I imagined my mouth as a pen and my voice as the ink.

“He died,” I said. “My dad.”

I didn't look at Amelia. I let the words write themselves on the wall.

“I don't remember him. He was home watching me, my mom says. When I was two. And he had something go wrong with his brain. A little explosion in a blood vessel. So he died in less than a second.
Poof
. Gone.”

I had a sudden thought of the power going out. Lights one second, then everything blinking into darkness. I wondered if that was what it had been like for my dad.

“I'm sorry,” said Amelia.

“I didn't know him. So I can't miss him. Right? You can't miss someone you don't know, can you?”

“I think you can. Probably.”

“Maybe. Maybe you can. I think about him sometimes. We lived in North Carolina then, and he's buried with his parents there, so I don't even have a grave to visit or anything. But Mom tells me stories. How he used to hold me up and sing to me like I was Simba in
The Lion King
. How he used to moonwalk when she got mad at him, just to crack her up. How he drank coffee all the time, and he sweetened it with maple syrup, not sugar. But they'd only known each other four years when he died, so I don't know if she knew him too much herself. You need lots of years, don't you? To really know someone?”

“You know me. I know you,” said Amelia.

“If he'd been around when Mom got sick, he could have helped. He was strong, she says. He used to do push-ups before he went to bed. He could have lifted her into the shower and held her up when she got dressed and carried her down to the ambulance when it came that one time. I tried to, but I had to leave her on the stairs and go wait outside without her. Do you think she would have felt better if he was still around?”

Amelia had scooted closer to me, her foot just an inch or so away from mine. “You're not really listening to my answers, are you?” she said softly.

I kept writing on the wall with my voice.

“Sometimes I think it would have been better if he were here. If there were two of us to help her. But, still, he wouldn't have known her as well as I do. I've had a lot more years with her. I know she can't chew gum because she always forgets and swallows it, and she's allergic to Windex, and she always gets teary-eyed when she sees an old person in a wheelchair. For some reason.”

I could have gone on for hours about Mom, all the little things about her that I knew. I could have written an entire book on her—
Mysteries of Mom
, and it would've had a thousand pages of facts.

“So I'm the one who should know when there's something wrong,” I said to Amelia. “I'd be able to see it better than anybody. If she starts feeling bad again and doesn't want to admit it, I'm the one who can tell if she's out of breath or holding her side or sleeping more than she usually does. If I'm watching her, I could maybe stop it.”

“Stop what?” asked Amelia.

I looked at her. It seemed so obvious.

“The sickness,” I said. “The tumors. If I see it happening again and I get her to the doctors, she'll have a better chance of getting well. The earlier they catch things, the better the chance they can fix them. I read that.”

“But she's well, isn't she?” said Amelia. “She's totally recovered now. It's not like she had a disease or anything. She had surgery, they took some stuff out, and now she's all better.”